Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/46

He must atone, somehow, according to the code of the hills.

But how? Blood money? Of course. But a life was a life, and a son was a son—and there was his own little son running and playing through the gray rooms of the Raven's Station.

The hadji had fallen on the ground, his hands stretched out, clutching the short-stemmed, tufted grass, his body jerking and twitching.

"Hadji!" said the Red Chief. "Hadji!"—and, as the other did not reply, did not hear, "by Allah, I did not will—this!"

He was silent. His lips twisted oddly, and had the hadji looked up he would have seen a tear in the mountaineer's beady, puckered eyes—a tear which, strangely, seemed to lift what was abominable into something not altogether unworthy; to overshadow, somehow, the drab, cruel, sinister fact of the broken body down there by the cataract of the Kabul River.

"Hadji!" the mountaineer called again. Then, as the other did not look up, did not reply, hardly seemed to breathe, he walked away, shrugging his broad shoulders. What was done was done, he thought, and he would pay blood money as the Koran demands it. Also, he would give the hadji a wife from among his own people, and there would yet be another little boy, with hawklike profile and deep-set eyes, to prate about Peace.

And he took the road to the Raven's Station, where he gave a sound beating to the blind mullah—who, according to the Red Chief's simple logic, had been the cause of the whole trouble—while the hadji was knitting his riven soul to hold the pain in his heart.